Ready Reference for John Varley Fans

Maps of the regions of Gaea

For the novels Titan, Wizard and Demon, John Varley created one of the most thought provoking scenarios in all of Science Fiction, the living habitat known as Gaea. This habitat is similar to the space station in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, in that it is an enclosed wheel spun for gravity. It is as large as a moon and divided into twelve regions, six day and six night; the light coming from mirrors shining though windows on the roof. Reading the novels the reader is given such a cartographic depiction of the scene that maps begin to spontaneously appear in the reader's mind. I created these for my own personal use for my fourth reading of the series. I found it to be an imaginative exercise that gave me a more complete sense of the story.

These maps were created using MacDrw Pro. I finally found a way to convert them into a PC compatible format, but lost some of the features. The originals contain several layers and greater detail. I have plans to revise them in a more realistic arial-view style using shaded relief to indicate the topography. I now realize that the night regions should be much wider than I have shown them; that, too, will have to wait for the next rev.

The maps of Hyperion and Rhea are styled after the JM Weissillustration from Titan, which must be considered authoritative. The others I based solely on my interpretation of the text, so the features may differ wildly from the author's intention, or the imagination of other readers.

The first drawing is a schematic displaying the day and night regions of Gaea. If Gaea were a clock face Crius would be at the 12:00 position. The maps are displayed below in the order of Cirroco's interrupted circum-Gaea trip in Wizard: Hyperion, Rhea, Crius, Phoebe, Tethys, Thea, and lastly, Dione from the novel Demon. Missing are: Metis, Iapetus, Chronus, Mnemosyne, and Oceanus. These are the fly-over regions seen by the Gaean air-force in Demon.